liberal

I was watching a video where the host was asked whether he thought voting should be mandatory.

He was split on the issue, and argued a bit from both perspectives. On one hand he thought that since we have mandatory jury duty, it makes sense that we could have mandatory voting. He also argued it might be better for the country, since in polling, America (and you could likely argue the same in many Western countries) the country leans Left, which means the Liberal party would be far more likely to win.

On the other hand, he didn’t much like the idea that people would be forced to vote.

I’m pretty firmly in the camp against mandatory voting. In fact, I think mandatory jury duty is awful as well, and it isn’t a good excuse to force people to do more.

Anyhow, I made a video about it that goes a little bit more in depth. It also includes the original hosts points.

The combined wealth of the richest 1 percent will overtake that of the other 99 percent of people next year unless the current trend of rising inequality is checked, Oxfam warned today ahead of the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos.

So basically, instead of having a minimum wage, you would have a maximum wage. Either this would mean that people weren’t allowed to make over a certain number depending on their profession or (and I like this option better) depending on how much the highest paid person of that company makes, the lowest worker would be guaranteed a certain amount.

So for example (and these are hypothetical numbers) the CEO of company A makes $500,000 per year. This might mean that the lowest paid position in that company is guaranteed to make 10% of that amount, which would work out to $50,000 per year.

As wages for the highest paid positions go up, so to does the wages of the lowest paid positions.

The arguments I’ve heard against this position (or ones I could imagine) are that by capping wages, you take away the incentive to achieve more. This would especially be true in the first scenario that features a hard cap on wages, but the second scenario of scaling wages would still allow for wage increases but would simply mean that those wage increases would be across the board.

You could also argue that it will take a lot of bureaucracy to figure out a fair percentage between the highest paid positions and the lowest, but I don’t think that’s a great argument because it could be done given enough political will.

The most convincing argument against a maximum wage or scaled wage system is that it will chase companies away. They won’t want to operate within a system that doesn’t allow them to take advantage of…errr…increase their pay without also raising the pay of their employees.

Personally, I can see why that might raise concerns.

So what are your thoughts? Do you think either of these two ideas have merit or do you believe the way things run now is working better than either of these ever could?

Hell, I’m no economist. I’m surprised I’m even typing this because money and math both bore the shit out of me.

At one point, the victim was threatened with a knife and told to curse President-elect Donald Trump.

“Say f— Donald Trump,” someone is heard saying.

“F— Donald Trump,” the victim says.

And:

The suspects, three of whom are Chicago residents, are expected to be charged in the next 24 hours, Cmdr. Duffin said. Police will determine whether kidnapping or hate crime charges will be given to the suspects, who he described as “young adults.” They have all given video statements.

When I first heard this story on social media last night, I tried finding it on major news networks because I thought it might be a hoax. There have been several fake hate crimes reported since the election of Donald Trump, but this one seems to be the real thing.

Last night I was able to find a story on CBS but other mainstream news channels have begun to report on it this morning.

I think it should definitely be classified as a hate crime. It was racially and politically motivated and they have video evidence of the attackers yelling racial and political slurs.

The reason why I’ve written so much about ideologies lately on this blog is because of identity politics and how dangerous I believe it to be. I think this is another direct result of that.

We put people into racial and gender categories instead of treating them like individuals and then we teach some of those categories that other groups are oppressing them. We even teach people that some groups are incapable of being racist, when that (power + prejudice = racism) clearly isn’t true.

I think these types of events will continue to escalate as long as we go down the insidious path of identity politics.

I just published a new video addressing a comment I received as well as the larger issue of group-think. I hope you’ll give it a watch, and if you do and enjoy it, I hope you’ll consider giving it a thumbs up on YouTube.

Well, I think (maybe it wasn’t me but someone else or a combination of more than one person or incident) I broke the Coalition of the Brave with my evil insistence that the writer back up her assertion that she was using facts…when she wasn’t.

The conversation we had was taken down shortly after, and only comments that agreed with the author were left up.

So unfortunately, I can’t show you what the original conversation was about. It had something to do with Melania Trump and fashion designers refusing her service.

But…I can show you how the site owner is now apologizing because he (again, I think he’s referencing me) had the audacity to say that I had made a valid point. At the time, he admitted that his writer had used an unfortunate word choice. Since then, I guess he’s lost that writer as well as another one.

Let’s get into this new post.

I should have said this ages ago. I’m going to say it now.

This Coalition has recently lost two fantastic contributors because I didn’t stick up for them. Why didn’t I stick up for them, I hear you ask?

Oh, but why did you not stick up for them?

I tell myself it’s because I don’t like confrontation, but that’s bullshit. I did it on the grounds of white male privilege. Not knowingly, but that’s the reason.

Holy crap. Bloody hell. You’re going to apologize for being white and male. That somehow makes your point invalid?

What you originally did (in my case) was fine – you admitted that you thought they were wrong to assert something as fact that wasn’t fact. That has nothing to do with your skin color or gender.

Snap out of the white guilt, mate. Being white and male isn’t something to be ashamed of any more than any other skin color. They are arbitrary attributes, and you didn’t choose to be born white or male. You’re a person and your opinions are just as valid as someone else’s, regardless of their skin color.

It sounds like you’re referencing more than one case, but people shouldn’t need protection from disagreement. A public blog isn’t a safe space and if you’re going to blog about controversial topics, you should expect to be disagreed with.

It’s all well and good offering platitudes and nodding and saying you understand, but unless you’ve walked in another person’s shoes, you can’t claim to truly understand their experiences. I am not black, nor am I a woman – and I’m never going to be either of those. When they came to me with concerns about being harassed and belittled, I should have tried to see things from their perspective.

Trying to see things from anthers perspective is a good thing to do no matter who you happen to be talking to. It’s called empathy and self-reflection. It’s also why we have language. We can talk to one another and explain how our experiences impact us as individuals.

However, being black, white, gay, heterosexual, man, woman etc doesn’t mean your opinion is more valid than someone else’s. Being disagreed with is not the same as being harassed.

And maybe she was harassed. I don’t know what he’s referencing here, but I find it hard to believe that someone that seems as reasonable and mild-mannered as Darth would sit on his hands and do nothing if someone were truly being harassed.

But that’s just my opinion and certainly not a fact.

Whether the people doing the harassing knew what they were doing, I don’t know. It’s entirely possible that, like me, they weren’t consciously doing it, and just couldn’t perceive their actions through a different perspective. Sometimes our privilege blinds us. We are guilty of institutionalised sexism, racism and bigotry, without even realising it.

Nah, mate. You’re basically saying people are guilty of thought crimes. You don’t get to assert that everyone is racist, sexist and bigoted.

That’s not how it works. It might work that way in Regressive Land, where everyone is valued based on how many oppression’s they can claim, but not in reality.

Oh yeah, and if your referencing me in this part, please know I was consciously disagreeing with that author. I knew exactly what I was doing. When people say that something is a fact when it isn’t, I challenge them on it.

Then Pink comes into the picture. And damn if I didn’t find myself cheering.

Hell yes, Pink. I think you’re missing the point though – these people (besides the blog owner, I think, who seems reasonable) don’t want discussion. They want yes men and women to nod and tell them how right they are and how oppressed they must be.

Pink is absolutely right here, but the response he gets is priceless. He’s told that he’s part of the problem because he’s a man.

Check your privilege, Pink! Don’t you know you’re a white male!

Pink is now being problematic. He’s part of the problem.

This is my favorite bit here. This is exactly what I told the site owner previously.

If you want to run a site based on discussion, you have to allow dissenting opinions and in my humble opinion, he should find writers who hold a differing viewpoint from his regular contributors to showcase a different point of view. Otherwise, you’re running an echo-chamber.

Like Pink says here, if you want to ‘change minds’ you need to engage people in discussion. Not create an echo-chamber.

Last but not least, good job on being the voice of reason in this case, Pink.

The decision to remove “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain and “To Kill A Mockingbird” by Harper Lee came after a parent filed a complaint, WAVY reported. The parent cited excessive racial slurs as the reason for wanting the books banned, Superintendent Warren Holland told the news station.

The parent, whose son is biracial, said that her concerns are “not even just a black and white thing.”

“I keep hearing, ‘This is a classic, This is a classic,’ … I understand this is a literature classic. But at some point, I feel that children will not — or do not — truly get the classic part — the literature part, which I’m not disputing,” she said at a Nov. 15 school board meeting. “This is great literature. But there (are so many) racial slurs in there and offensive wording that you can’t get past that.”

The parent said her son, who was reading “Huckleberry Finn” for a high school assignment, couldn’t get past a certain page in that story on which the N-word appeared seven times.

A racial slur appears 219 times in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and 48 times in “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

“So what are we teaching our children? We’re validating that these words are acceptable, and they are not acceptable by (any) means,” the parent said, also noting psychological effects language has on children. “There is other literature they can use.”

It is important to note that some Accomack residents were not in favor of the ban, saying such a policy presents a dangerous slippery slope when it comes to literature in education.

“I don’t want to see it happen because if you start with one racial word in a book and have to go on and on and on and pretty soon you’ll be burning books left and right,” R. Kellam told WAVY.

And another parent, Catherine Glaser, who has children who will go through the Virginia school system, said, “Everybody’s read it. … It didn’t change a difference in my views at all. I’d like my son to read those books. … My daughter’s mixed, and I don’t have a problem with it. I love those books.”

So where do you come out on this debate? Should the books be banned or do you think they should remain a part of the school curriculum?

Personally, I’m against censorship, and I agree with most of what the video commentator said above. I think this is a slippery slope and once you start banning books for one thing, that sets a precedent to keep doing it for other books people might consider offensive.

In my opinion, this is another case of insane PC’ism striking again.

If you agree, why? If not, feel free to make your case in the comment section.

Since the election, I’ve tried to find out what the Alt-Right is. It’s so frustrating because everyone seems to have a different definition. Some people say that it’s a movement of people from the Right who are outside of the mainstream. Others that it’s a white supremacist movement, and others that they’re pranksters who just enjoy making memes and trolling the Left.

I did run across two videos that seem to do a good job of trying to explain what the Alt-Right is and how it became a movement.

The first of the videos (follow the link if you want to watch it) says that the Alt-Right has four tiers. Those Tiers run from Western Nationalism to an outright White Supremacist movement.

It’s an interesting video so I hope you’ll watch it.

The second video talked about Milo and Steve Bannon as well as how the Alt-Right formed and became an influential political factor. I found this video very interesting as well.

In that video, the creator claims that Milo and Bannon aren’t part of the Alt-Right but that they’ve tried to shape the movement into something they can use. He thinks that effort is doomed to failure, because at its core, the Alt-Right is deeply racist.

He also believes that the extreme Left acts as a mirror and the two groups amplify each other, and that while the extreme Left uses words such as ‘racist’, ‘misogynist’ and ‘Islamophobic’ to silence dissent, the Alt-Right uses the word ‘degenerate’ to do the same thing.

Anyhow, I hope you’ll give the video a watch and let me know what you think. What is the Alt-Right? How did they become a political force? Do you think they’re a real phenomenon or a conspiracy theory made up by the paranoid media and its pundits?